I tried Netvibes, but it's more of a pain to move things around, and the nagging to upgrade to the insanely expensive pro version got way too annoying - the mechanism to make me consider it was consistently refusing to load without logging in.

I appear to have given up now and rely on having a page of frequently used tabs.

To be realistic, I rarely actually got around to listening to all the podcasts ...

What I want to know now is why the new GMail is vastly slower than the old one